The U.S. Virgin Islands are beautiful, and one day I would love to visit in person. The tropical paradise is a horror show for gun owners, however, and I doubt I’ll set foot there anytime soon.
The USVI is already facing a lawsuit from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division alleging numerous infringements on our Second Amendment rights, and the territory’s legislature has previously tried to moot the case by ramming through a sweeping gun control bill that supposedly addressed the DOJ’s complaints. The DOJ denies that lawmakers have actually come into compliance with the Constitution, and have actually added the territory’s new bans on so-called assault weapons and “large capacity” magazines to its complaint.
Under Act 9113, no firearm in the USVI may contain a magazine of 15 rounds or greater. The USVI legislature recently changed that, though, with an amendment attached to a completely unrelated bill appropriating money for a pedestrian bridge. As Virgin Island Safe Gun Owners complains, the amendment was adopted “without timely public disclosure, a public hearing, or any opportunity for affected Virgin Islanders to testify.”
The Legislature’s post-session tracker now lists the floor amendment as Amendment No. 36-886.
Neither Bill No. 36-0344 nor the firearms amendment appeared in the Legislature’s official August 26 session bill folder before the vote. The last text VISGO obtained – draft Amendment No. 36-859, revised August 21 – still left the host bill number and section number blank. As of this release, the tracker’s link to Amendment No. 36-886 did not provide the adopted text. VISGO therefore cannot determine whether the floor text corrected any of the defects in the last available draft.
The draft of the amendment, which is all we have to go on at the moment, redefines “large capacity” magazines as any handgun magazine that can hold more than 17 rounds of ammunition and more than 30 rounds for rifles. That’s a pretty blatant attempt to keep a magazine ban in place while recognizing the Third Circuit Court of Appeals recently shot down New Jersey’s ban on “large capacity” magazines (defined as anything that can hold more than 10 rounds).
It also repeals the outright ban on suppressors, but as VISGO explains, “offers only a narrow permission to possess a federally lawful suppressor at a residence, business, or licensed range and to transport it directly between those locations. It expressly disclaims public carrying. More importantly, it does not clearly authorize use at a residence or business; the unchanged range provision is the only clause that clearly permits use.”
There are other issues in the draft amendment that VISGO has flagged. Among them:
The Police Commissioner may still suspend a license based on evidence supporting a “reasonable belief” that the licensee no longer qualifies or “presents a danger to the community.” The licensee must then surrender the license, every registration certificate, and every firearm within 48 hours – before any independent decisionmaker has heard the matter.
Draft Amendment No. 36-859 strikes all of section 453(j), thereby deleting Act No. 9113&’s only express definition of “residence” without explanation. Yet the amendment uses residence as the boundary for lawful suppressor possession and transportation. It leaves citizens to guess whether a front step, porch, yard, detached garage, hotel room, or common area is inside or outside the residence. A licensed homeowner who moves beyond the front door during an emergency to defend a family member or the home with a lawfully owned suppressed firearm could face felony exposure depending on how an officer or prosecutor draws an undefined line. A law carrying up to 10 years in prison cannot leave that question to guesswork.
VISGO is calling on the governor to reject the amendment and the legislature to hold a public hearing before any future votes are held. Frankly, that’s the least the USVI government could do, but I suspect even those modest attempts at accountability will be too much for the anti-gunners in the territorial government.
The legislature is trying to cover its collective rear end while still putting the screws to lawful gun owners, and I don’t think it’s going to end well for lawmakers. The problem, though, is that they can still do real damage to the right to keep and bear arms until the federal courts deliver a benchslap, and that could take some time.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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